Unintended Cultivator

Sen listened with a mixture of amusement and concern to the report of all of the newly cooperative sects that were reaching out to him through a variety of means. Some were coordinating with the sects that had the communication cores while others had sent messengers. He wasn’t sure how he felt about anyone below the nascent soul stage being ordered to travel alone through such dangerous territory, but he also wasn’t sure that he could or should try to put a stop to it. He needed to know who was on-board, at least in theory, for future planning purposes. Not that he was quite ready to act on any of that yet. He was still enacting his smaller plans for the town and sect.

He had shepherded the borderline mortals into the ranks of cultivators, and done something similar for the qi-condensing cultivators. Only some of the latter had made it to foundation formation. Around a third had fallen short for reasons that remained more than a little opaque to him, although Auntie Caihong assured him that those results were actually good. There was no easy way to tell if the ones who didn’t make it were at a true bottleneck or just needed more time. Less surprising to him were the foundation formation cultivators. Sen had gone into that process expecting that many, if not most of them, would reach the peak of foundation formation and fail to break into the core formation stage. That was exactly what happened.

There was a barrier between those two stages that the basic accumulation of power couldn’t breach. Forming a core required a disciplined mind to compress the qi in the dantian until it solidified into a core. While all cultivators were disciplined to one degree or another, that level of mental discipline was out of reach for many. No master could provide it for a student. It had to be built by the individual, hour after grueling hour, day after grueling day, until the moment to form the core came. Given just how hard and unnaturally he was pushing their advancements, he’d been surprised that the handful who did break through achieved it. They had drawn more than a little envy. Still, even having six new core cultivators to work with would make life easier in so many ways moving forward.

Advancing the core cultivators at his sect was a different problem altogether. He had managed to give most of them a boost, but there had never been a chance of getting any of them to the nascent soul stage. He hadn’t needed anyone to explain that to him either. None of them were ready. Fu Ruolan had told him that breaking through into that stage required a kind of self-knowledge and insight. They didn’t have it. He couldn’t be sure how he had drawn that conclusion, but it felt right. So, he had spared them and himself the pain of failure. Instead, he focused on pushing them closer to that peak. Even those incremental steps forward meant substantial leaps in power for most of them. That was power he was quite certain that he would need. That left two people he needed to address. One of them was looking at him at that very moment.

“Why am I last?” demanded Falling Leaf.

He’d been expecting this question for a while. It’s the question he would have asked in her place. Fortunately, he hadn’t been waiting to help her advance for a foolish reason.

“I haven’t been doing a lot of alchemy in the last couple of years,” said Sen. “If I was going to practice, I wanted to practice on people that mean less to me than you. I wanted to be as ready as I could be when your turn came. Besides, you aren’t last.”

Falling Leaf tilted her head to one side and blinked at him in confusion.

“What do you mean?”